November update

Still running twice weekly games and having a good time.  Roll20 is working well for this kind of campaign and the sheets are working as is keeping various maps in play for overland travel, dungeon exploration and managing handouts.

In the playtest some players are starting to hit level 4 as they explore and fight their way across the wilds.  I think that the rate of advancement is about perfect, combats are averaging about 3-4 encounters and around 250-300XP per six player session and they are spending a good amount of treasure to top up to next level when they return to town.  It will be interesting to see how this shapes up as they hit the mid levels 5-7 and see if it still seems to track.  

The overland map is expanding outward as they explore and looks like this now:

The northern wilds

Using the VTT features in roll20 is great although I wish I could use a tablet or something to do the live drawing part since using a mouse with their tools is very obtuse.  The players are able to add annotations to the maps and I am using copy/paste to lay out the terrain icons which works well.  In Roll20 the DM needs to manage the map I think although I would love if the players did take on more mapping and notetaking.

I'm currently working on the 7.4 rule update which is a bunch of minor tweaks and fixes more than any big changes.  Still slowly updating the spell descriptions to make them more skill facing and still working on more challenging monsters.  One player bought a bunch of war dogs and we quickly realized that adding 2HD for trained animals was too much, so that buff got scaled back to 1HD.

I'm tightening up the language around combat round actions a bit, each round you get an attack action and a maneuver or two maneuvers.  

Attack actions are: 

• weapon attacks;
• aiming;
• casting spells;
• defense.  

I specifically listed Aim as an attack action since PCs with multiple attacks could then use an attack to take aim if they wanted.  I also called out the Defense action here which makes it more clear how that works to provide AC bonus.   

Maneuver actions are: 

• movement of various kinds;
• manipulating items;
• swapping gear;
• assist;
• or other miscellaneous actions.  

The assist action is new here and I see this as a replacement for things like flanking or other ways to give another player advantage and still leverage the initiative system.  The way announcing actions and movement happens it is too hard for players to rely on combat positions for bonuses so having this action will mitigate that I hope.  It also lets other players set up surprise attacks for rogues which would let them act sooner in the round than if they had to set themselves up.  These are not really changes so much as clarifications to existing mechanics and hopefully its all a lot more clear for those reading the rules now.

I also formalized overland travel and rest around the 4 hour "watch" period, generally rolling for an encounter and giving a travel description for each 4 hour period.  I standardized the journey encounter rolls to a d6 where 1 is an encounter on the relevant table and 6 is a 'character moment' where a PC will give some information about themselves either in a story or in interaction.  I like that idea since it gives some sense of time and getting to know one another on overland treks.  Players were kind of hesitant at first but since they know its coming up they are starting to warm to the idea and prepare things for it.  I like it a lot, especially since its an exploration game and I am discouraging long backstories at character creation.  I also added a petite rest because I noticed when they are resting players fall into the idea of first and second watch pretty quickly but it was a bit hard on PCs who only had minor wounds as they usually got tapped to keep watch.  I decided to give PCs who only rest for 4 hours a small HP recovery equal to their level.  I also want to make sure that PCs who didn't get at least 4 hours rest in a day would have disadvantage until they did.

No firm date on when I push this latest update out, but it will be soon.

The Encumbrance one

I realized a while ago that if I was going to run a crawl style game I needed to deal with time and resource management.  Now play-testing Beacon and I'm seeing it come up where the players want to rest after each fight, especially if the spell casters are down a few points.  This is understandable from a meta-game/video game perspective, but it plays hell with the whole idea of ratcheting tension.  I do have the player using rations every rest and only allowing partial rests in the wilderness, but they routinely carry around piles of cheap rations so its not effective.  The only way I can think of to deal with this is to limit the amount of supplies.  I remember from all sorts of attempts in the past to limit player inventory that no-one really likes dealing with encumbrance and even if your players are game to try things start to slide and some will keep better track than others.  Finally it falls on the Game master to manage all this and man but do you already have enough to worry about.  So a non-starter right?

Well I want to at least have some rules in Beacon for this even if they are optional rules.  I’m going to try to come up with something to use in my games that I can stick with and hopefully it’s also fun for the players, or at least interesting for them.  It got to be simple so players can follow it and so the GM can keep an eye on it.  I’ve been looking at the question and reading up on some OSR solutions from the past decade.  The two most interesting to me are the Stone system or a slot system like the ‘Anti-hammerspace’ system.  I like both of these and can see using either system, but before going any further with this I need to figure out the problem so I can find out what works design-wise.

The first stop on this quest then is to figure out why even have an encumbrance system.  You can track encumbrance to limit how much treasure players can carry, which is the oldest reason.  Another reason is to track how many items or the kind of armour a PC can equip, this seems to me the reason it’s currently done in D&D now.  Another reason is to track resources for travel, another is for simulation ‘realism’, and there are probably some additional reasons that escape me.

In Beacon the main reason to have encumbrance is to manage resources and provide support for the HP and damage economy.  Beacon spends a lot of effort making HP management important and allowing players to make trade offs with STR and resting.  I think that that’s the answer there the encumbrance system is there in order to provide meaningful choices relating to PCs resting, and to give more weight (sigh) to using STR as a HP buffer.  So I’m not too worried about realism or tracking a PC's armour and weapons, but I am concerned with how much food and water players carry since that will determine how long they can stay out and how often they can afford to rest.  I’m also interested in hauling big items and large amounts of treasure, but not as much as the food and light resources.  So that’s the core of the mechanic I want to build.  How much food/water a group can carry and the PC's STR needs to be relevant to this so that as they get weaker they have more decisions to make.  I’m not designing for realistic item weights or to manage what kinds of armour a PC has although if I can include some nods to it that’s OK.

Now to what I don't want to do.  I don’t want to penalize a player for having a real low STR, it’s already pretty bad for these guys.  STR is the PC damage limit, and is heavily leveraged for combat so if you make it so low STR characters can’t use heavy armour is a double whammy.  I just recently removed minSTR from weapons and armour and don’t want it creeping back in in an encumbrance system.  So a character with 3 STR needs to be able to wear any kind of armour, carry a weapon or two and at least a couple days supplies, that’s my baseline.  I also don't want to have to sort out how many pounds  everything weighs and then have players arguing about how much something weighs in 'real life' or telling me they can carry twice as much because they did it one-time back in scouts.  I only want to deal with item weight for important things and the units should be fairly abstract.  

So far both the 'stone' system and the slot system seem like they will work.  So maybe getting into some details will help.  If I were to use the stone system I can see it working something like this: some base number based on armour type +/- STR bonus.  The worst STR ‘bonus’ is -4 so when wearing heavy armour, that base number needs to be a bit bigger than 4, I’m thinking 6 because that leaves 2 units for the rest of your gear.   In my mind before looking into this at all I was thinking 60lb =/- 10lb per STR bonus which would abstract into 6 ten poundish units or 'stones', so that fits pretty well.  If I make heavy armour about 4 'stone' then the base number for someone wearing no armour would be 10 which is nice and simple to remember.

So 10 stone +/- 1 stone per STR bonus would give PCs a carrying range between 6 and 4 stone and quickly assigning items some values here:

Armour would be 4/3/1 stone for heavy/medium/light.  

Shields and heavy weapons would be 1 stone,

light weapons maybe half a stone or 1/3 stone, 

10 torches in a stone, 50' rope 1 stone and etc

Rations (in this case food and water) would be 2-3 per stone most likely.

Most items are pretty easy to eyeball in this range and smaller items can be ignored or grouped into a bag or a kit of some kind.  For all a players miscellaneous items I would say a bag or a pouch of them would be 1 stone, so all those little mirrors, maps, potions, tools, lock-picks etc would just go in that one bag.   Coins is the next item to consider but since in Beacon I went with lighter coins at 50/pound that would mean ~500 per stone which is pretty nice and round as well.

So pretty simple yea, but how will this fix the stated problem?  Well now its easier to see how much a PC can carry without getting too much detail.  A PC with 12 STR can have medium armour (3), a heavy weapon (1) , a sling and two daggers (1), a bag of misc gear (1), 10 torches (1),  4 days rations(2) would have 2 stone left available to carry 1000 coins, (or say a couple heavy gold candle sticks and a bag of coins) before they are bogged down and encumbered. If that same character takes 3-4 STR damage they are going to have to make some decisions on what to drop when they need that encumbered condition removed.   And if they are encumbered, what happens?  Well encumbered has to mean something like disadvantage which is nice and simple .  Also no dashing, maybe slower movement.  It should have enough of a bite to dissuade players from getting there but not so bad that they can't flirt with it.  

The stone system seems to work pretty well.  One problem I can see is that smaller items are going to fall between the gaps so that one bag or misc items is probably going to have 50 lb of stuff in it.  However I can press the ignore button quite a lot on that, so long as the important stuff gets tracked.  I also see a lot of players chiming in on how this or that should weigh less, but again I think that's manageable. Stone is pretty good since it keeps the basic idea of tracking weights already there but just makes the numbers more manageable.

What about the slot system, or some other way to abstract away items altogether?  I've played some good games that abstract away tracking items with resource dice or item slots but the main problem I have with those is that they wouldn't have the same amount of compatibility with all the legacy d20 systems.  That compatibility (in feel as well as mechanics) is one of the core design goals of Beacon so there would have to be a big advantage to use those systems if they drop those mechanics for something else.  Certainly Beacon is flexible enough you can bolt on any encumbrance system and it would work, but I think I would leave that up to the GM and not try to change the 'default'  Beacon rules too far from home.  For better or worse, d20 has at its core the idea of counting little things like coins and hp so keeping that feel is essential I think.  Any system to abstract that needs to keep that same taste while making it easier to manage.  I'll have to think about that some more.

July Update

Been a little while since the last post, but I'm unrepentant.  The play-tests have been going well and the players seem to be enjoying the game.  They also have flushed out some issues which is fantastic.  I have made corrections in the Roll20 character-sheet and made some additional adjustments to the version 7 draft which I updated and you can get here.

Most of the changes I have been makings are in purple text for now so the play-testers can find them easier, but here's a summary of the bigger things:

Melee weapon damage now includes the full STR bonus and two handed weapons get a +1 to damage.  I changed this from a practicality perspective because calculating half bonus is a pain in the ass and two-handed weapons were probably too powerful compared to one handed ones.  The +1 is good enough I believe.

I put in some conditions for taking various amounts of Stat damage, the system allows you to not use HP and instead take STR damage, and I like that idea since it allows for some decision making trade offs when a character wants to push themselves.  However now that Stat damage heals faster, a lot of players were using their STR as a HP heat sink in fights and then expecting to just heal up in downtime between sessions.  I didn't like this since it makes a HUGE difference for low level characters to soak up damage. So to balance things again I put in some conditions when you take various amounts of STR damage. 

Characters who have taken 2 or more STR damage cannot DASH and can only move once per round or half speed overland. A character taking 4 or more points of STR damage in one round are in Shock until they have had a Rest or proper attention. Characters in Shock are at disadvantage on all rolls. A character having 6 or more points of STR damage are in considerable and debilitating pain. They cannot take any actions unless they make a DC 12 Physical save to overcome the pain.

I have been toying with the idea of making these limits slightly different, perhaps use character level so that the available buffer grows along with HP, but I like this as a test and its a good way to include conditions which is something I wanted to do anyway.

I also formalized the time a little bit and fixed the definitions for turns vs rounds etc.  Some of this is to pave the way for fixing the spell descriptions and to add in a few exploration/resource rules.  Also I added in some rules for the weapon durability and adjusted the critical tables for that.  I like it and its pretty simple to track I believe, we'll see what the players think.

Tweaking the Divine...spells

I'm still on a spell kick and I have an idea to address a couple things three things I've wanted to do for a while.  The first thing came up in game as a discussion on potions of healing and cure light wounds - it seemed a bit cheap force a roll for a Cure Light Wounds potion - I mean you spend over 100gp for one of these it had better do more than heal 1 point of damage on a crappy roll.  The same applies to the spell  - you spend 3 hp to cast a Cure Light Wounds spell and then roll and heal up 1 point - that blows.

Secondly I have been wondering if it is appropriate in a spell point system to have the full list of Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Quite Small But Serious Wounds, Cure Silent But Deadly Wounds...  Really, if you need to cure some wounds cast Cure Light Wounds a couple times - it's not like you have to have them prepared.  Also, I know there are probably folks who will crunch some numbers and figure out which cure spells give you the best ratio per cost and everyone will stop using the others and they will be wasted space in the rule-book.

Thirdly I was thinking that clerics should have some spells to deal with 'spirits'.  I don't know why this is the case, maybe I have something from The Exorcist stuck in my subconsciousness  but I think that it just feels right to have some freaky ass ghost crap going down sometimes instead of having players just chopping up bed sheets.  However in order to do that kind of thing you need to give them tools to deal with it.  The cleric seems a natural fit for this.

Fourthly I have been looking at all the bipolar spells in the rulebook rethinking the idea that good clerics should cast the 'good' version of a spell and bad clerics cast the 'bad' version of it.  I mean really?  Wouldn't a bad cleric want to heal or buff his minions sometimes? It's not like bad creatures use negative hit points or anything.  I know a good cleric wouldn't want to use a Cause Serious Wounds spell on an enemy - but maybe a weak willed or misguided one would do it.  And really what's the difference between that and smashing in their head with your mace?

So I believe I'm going to do the following to deal with these things:

1. Change the wording in the note about reversing spells to make it more clear that this is a setting/character thing and not a 'rule' thing.
2. The Level 1 Cure/Cause Light Wounds will now do 4+1d4 hp damage.
3. The Level 2 Cure/Cause Moderate Wounds is gone to be replaced with Detect Spirits.
4. The Level 3 Cure/Cause Serious Wounds will now do 8+2d8 hp damage.
5. The Level 4 Cure/Cause Critical Wounds is gone to be replaced with Manifest

Detect Spirits (level 2 Divine spell)
Range: 25 ft. + 5 ft. /2 levels.
Duration: Concentration.
Description:  Reveals to the caster the presence of unseen spirits or ghosts and an impression of their nature/intent.  Can be used to determine if a creature or object is possessed.  Cannot be used to detect the presence of normal creatures that are hidden or invisible.

Manifest (level 4 Divine spell)
Range: 25 ft. + 5 ft. /2 levels.
Duration: Concentration + 1 round.
Description:  Causes spirits, or other incorporeal beings of HD lower than the casters level to be made corporeal. Entities possessing objects or creatures will be forced out of them and stunned for 1 round.

At the rate I'm going It will probably be like 900 years before this gets play tested properly but what the hell I think might be cool.

The party continues pt.2

One thing you might take note of if you've been following the Our Adventure so Far... posts about this Beacon play test is the fact that the party has been pretty successful in combat.  Aside from Tom getting a bit beat up and having to spend a few days convalescing, no one has been killed, maimed or turned into a newt as yet.  I'm not the type to try to build a body count, I didn't want Beacon to be the kind of game where players just don't die as the default.  There is no appropriate encounter level mechanic in Beacon, and how I want to run it, if you just run up and fight everything you find I expect you will loose a bunch of characters.  These were first level characters and they were running pell-mell into a lot of encounters with 4 or 5 opponents at a time- and they were generally cleaning up.  I was worried that I had a balance problem here.

I was also trying to figure out if the rest and recovery system was working properly.  The Beacon ability score healing rules can hand out some pretty steep time outs for characters who get hurt (remember it's one point per day per point below their normal score).  I wanted there to be a happy medium between the consequence free damage of a D&D or a Microlite and the long healing times of something like Savage Worlds.  I didn't want to have characters having to take a week off to heal after every decent fight, but I wanted the fights to matter.

Anyway, when we last left our heroes they were sitting on a hill outside a cave...

The party fired up their lanterns and torches and went back into the ruins.  They went back to the rooms they had fought the goblins in and noticed that the bodies had been taken away.  They delved deeper into the complex and came to a large high room with large stone pillars.  Suddenly crossbow bolts came flying from above and they spied a number of goblins up on a crude rope gantry between the pillars.  Battle was joined.  While Tom and Luc returned fire, Thedric cast a charm on one of the goblins.  Henril tied a rope to his torch and tossed it up into the gantry where it burned the ropes and brought it down as they dispatched all the goblins. The party was slightly wounded but they continued exploring, coming to another large room which had overturned tables and benches as barricades from which they saw more goblins peeping out.  Again a full on charge and they rushed the barricades, killing one goblin and sending the others fleeing down a dark hallway.  They characters gave chase and followed them into a small room where there were more goblins - 6 in total.  Now I had been rolling pretty well this session and although the players were doing great, they were taking damage.  As they piled into the fray and started taking more damage it soon became apparent that this might not have been a good idea.  They managed to kill two of the goblins but one by one they were taken down and soon everyone except Thedric (who had been hanging back out of the fight with a goblin he had charmed) was unconscious or on their last legs.  It looked like a TPK.  Rather than fleeing, he opted to cast Disguise Self - not a true illusion but as it was busy and dark and he was with a goblin companion, I allowed that that goblins wouldn't detect the ruse.  As the last (but one) PC went down Thedric began to 'loot' the bodies and quickly pulled out the scorpion venom from Henril's pack.  He pretended this was a delicious treat and quickly the remaining goblins gulped it down*  - and fell to the floor poisoned!  His goblin companion was most impressed with this and though it a good strategy as now they had a greater share of the loot between them.  Thedric and his companion started to drag the unconscious bodies out of the ruins, unfortunately as they were bringing them out, they were attacked by a giant bat and barely made it out with the other three PCs - and were forced to leaving their hired man Luc.  Thedric said goodbye to his goblin companion and quickly started driving the wagon back to town - hoping to get some distance from the ruined hall before dark.

I bet you're happy to see this dude again. 

Now I'm a fan of the random encounter table and I had been using a some simple 1d10 tables, one for the forest road, one for the hills, and one for the swamps.  I'd roll three times a day for an encounter with a 25% chance of one occurring and then roll a d10 on the appropriate table.  When the party was returning wounded from the 'haunted' hobgoblin building in the second session, I rolled a wandering woodcutter.  If I had rolled bandits or goblins or a bear things probably would have ended differently.  Well this time as they fled into the twilight, I rolled an encounter and again it was a wandering woodcutter.  

The party, badly beaten - all at 1-2 hp and Henril at -5 STR, paid the woodcutter a gold coin per night to let them recover in his house.   They stayed there 3 days resting and healing before they decided to leave.  As they had invested a lot into the venture and so far with no return, they were determined to go back and find some treasure.  

The party was back up to snuff with the exception of Henril who was at full HP but still weakened.  He had not been able to heal up a STR point as yet (that would take 5 days).  They journeyed back to the ruins and quickly traced their steps back to the room where they had been beaten.  They found the goblin bodies where they left them and also the body of their retainer Luc.  They also noted that there were strange footprints which led them to believe that someone or something had followed their path from their last visit.
In the very next room they found what they were after, a locked store room which had three small chests filled with silver.  They continued exploring, in another room finding a key and an ancient note mentioning 'a [secret] storeroom north of the well'.   They did not meet any more goblins but they did find an old forge and a river fed pool that contained a crocodile (which the druid calmed and then much to her chagrin the others dispatched).  Determined to find the secret store room they pressed on and came across a suspiciously cold room.  After trying to figure out the cause of the cold (brown mold) and having it double in size and intensity on them, Henril decided to charge through the room to the hallway beyond.  He made it through but passed out in the hallway just beyond and the party (after a short discussion) had to also charge through to rescue him.  Having made good use of the Goodberry spell, the druid handed out enough berries to revive the party and, having no way to get back to the entrance, they decided to rest in an alcove further down the hallway.     

I am not a monster and I like the game to move along so I am in favour of allowing players to get back partial hp for short rests.  I don't want to have a situation where this gets abused however and I think that managing hp, food and light is one of the more interesting aspects of the game.  I allowed back half hp for their rest, which was probably a bit too much.  I think in the future I would do something like say you can gain back 2-3 hp per hour rested if it's under a certain amount - like 4 hours.  Once you hit 4 hours then you can hand out 1/4 or 1/2 their hp back depending on the quality of the rest.  These little 'breathers' would be good to lubricate the game I think, certainly letting them get out of some sticky situations.

Anyway the party was partly recovered and decided to check out the end of the hallway since there were carvings and it looked like they were near some interesting feature (and they couldn't go back past the mold, now being without any berries).  They came on an old temple dedicated to the Lords of Order and since ransacked.  In the middle of the temple was a large hairy beast chained to a dias.  They moved to attack it and battle was joined.  Once it smelled them it rushed to the end of it's chain, throwing heavy benches and trying to punch Henril who had brazenly run up to face it.  They dispatched the poor thing and proceeded to search the chamber, finding some silver and gold ornaments hidden in the dais.

All in all a good session, probably the best one yet in my mind.  Once I calculated the experience we found that most of the party had passed the magic 1000xp mark (they'd been averaging 250-300 per session) and I decided to level them on the spot rather than making them return to town first since it was the first level up and they were trapped in the dungeon.  I am glad I didn't follow through with my plan of giving them a level per session which would have allowed a decent test of the leveling mechanic but probably wouldn't have been useful since it has taken some time to get things going.  They would have been level 4 before learning how the fighting works and I wouldn't have any idea as to how the lower level monsters and situations were working out.  I had been worried that the combat was too easy but this session showed how quickly things could turn around on them.

*when things get interesting, go with it I say.